Selected Poems Jacques Dupin

These poems feel like poetry of a certain clear questioning existensial mind. They are precise and colored brightly. But after having read a long prose work of Auster's not long ago, I found them diminished things, not capable of giving anything like the context and complexity his prose can. This too is a matter of understandibility. The language of prose we are told gives a clear surface meaning. The language of poetry is more resistant to this. And more the prose builds a narrative, and brings us characters and situations. The voice of the prose I am thinking of, 'The Brooklyn Follies' was clear and well- defined. Here the abstract impersonal voice means we never quite know where we. Auster can make poetry of abstraction but the message tends to be one more of the no, no, nothing of things rather than their fullness in being. Nonetheless whether it is in finding 'consolation in colors' or in trying to remember himself ( lost in the wide world/ within me, and thereby to have known/ that in spite of myself / I am here. / As if this were the world..." or in 'Facing the Music' "where the air and earth erupt in this profusion of chance, the random forces of our own lack of knowing what it is we see, and merely to speak of it is to see how words fail us,how nothing comes right in the saying of it, not even these words I am moved to speak in the name of this blue and green that vanish into the air of summer. Impossible to hear it anymore. The tongue is forever taking us away from where we are, and nowhere can we be at rest in the things we are given to see, for each word is an elsewhere, a thing that moves more quickly than the eye, even as this sparrow moves, veering into the air in which it has no home. I believe, then in nothing..... these words might give you, and still I can feel them speaking through me.." Auster defines a voice of his own wondering seeing and feeling, a voice which can too awaken the reader to some sense of the ' dearest freshness deep down things' sometimes.

Dupin's poetry brings together fear and desire, death and life, oppositions which fuse together not out of juxtaposition but out of a bleeding neccesity for eachother. Death and life do not contrast in dupin, they are one. Opposing themselves within themselves, self rending and fusing simulataneously. Parageneous and sublime.